A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Friday, October 31, 2014

A Word on Editing

First
of all, happy Halloween.

So. I’m
in the process of publishing my first trilogy, as you know. Since I was going
to be putting a lot of time (it won’t be available until March of ’15) and
money (I’m subsidy publishing, so I’m out $2,000) into the project, I thought
it would be in my best interest to produce the best possible product in the
end. I decided I would look into purchasing line-editing from my publishers.

Then, I found out that to line-edit my whole trilogy
would cost me $8,000. In a words “no”. The company admits that is pretty
over-priced. A standard line-editing job costs about $2.50 a page, which, for
my rather large manuscript comes to around $1,500. That’s a lot, but it isn’t $8,000.
If the manuscript wasn’t a whole trilogy even my publishing company’s price
might not kill anybody, but when it comes to line editing, here’s a hint.

You know somebody who can do it.

I’ve handed the job over to my parents and
siblings. All you have to do to catch typos, misspellings, and obvious grammatical
errors is read the manuscript. If you’re not incredibly knit-picky about the
subtleties of English grammar, you won’t even need to hire a retired English teacher,
(though that’s much easier to do than you think.) The company gave me some valuable
information about my books: there’s nothing wrong with the plot structure.
Score. All I really needed was line-editing.

So, I’m saving myself anywhere from $1,500 to
$8,000 and having my family help out. I think they can get it pretty clean.
Check out the Stardrift Trilogy in
March to see how this worked out!